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The thing which will eventually drag me into the desktop Linux daily user realm will be when I have no choice but to have to rely on post-Mojave iterations of macOS on T1-embedded Macs. That won’t be for a few more years at least, possibly longer.

And although I’ve, on occasion, run across desktop environments which tried to ape Aqua and/or Marble, they still show through in key ways as being not-either. And for me, that’s the problem. With enough granular configuration, one might be able to completely port over the look and feel of either Aqua or Marble down to the finest detail — from a top menubar with, say, the distro icon living where the Apple icon lives; to pull-downs with shortcuts not spelled out (“Ctrl+T” for new tab? heck no. “⌘T” or go home; “Shift+Ctrl+N”new folder? no. “⇧⌘N” plz & tyvm); to the use of an antialiased Lucida Grande for text elements.

I realize what it is I want: the entire desktop environment being virtually indistinguishable from Finder, down to shortcut keys, even if the DE has to be called “Locator” instead of “Finder” for legal reasons; underneath, the “bones” are linux, not Darwin.

That’s it. That’s all I want. I want to go on working from the front-end without having to be reminded how I abandoned the UX/UI which now registers as deep muscle memory dating back over thirty years (which is, incidentally, another reason I’ve written off all the “SoCal-named” versions of macOS, especially Big Sur and later).
 
Allow me to add an option to this discussion which might be entirely unhelpful, but I know it works, can be booted from a live CD, and it is very fast: Ubuntu 6.10 (http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/releases/edgy/). I used it the other day for nostalgia fun. You would have to do an enormous amount of work if you wanted a modern web browser (I don't), but other than that there are a good amount of out-of-the-box software packages you can grab as the old 6.10 repos (amazingly) are still online.

If this wasn't helpful at all...please disregard =).

EDIT: I should note the trackpad support is mediocre at best, as to be expected. Get your external mouse ready if you're going to use.
..and it doesn't just stop there, doc. I was looking thru the more recent software in Macintosh garden last night - the year 2000 on stuff. There are absolute treasures in there that have been shelved.

There's some Japanese software and one (seemingly odd to me at least) was a graphic novel. No - not like a digitised comic. I forget wot this art form is called but discovered it has a big following and there's software to make your own. You have a choice of back ground scenes, characters with character expressions ..so you write a talking script for the characters. They seem to be all set in high school with high school kids..and the conversations are...like kids conversations. Lol.

But last night I discovered an early tool kit for the Mac, called 'Hollywood'..with rather odd looking characters - one a guy who is kinda palm tree like.
Made me wonder if that is where the idea came from.
 
I'm fuzzy as to the correct use of punctuation marks

With haiku, I don’t think punctuation marks matter — as in, they could be or not be there, just as long as five-seven-five is in there. :)

And you're asking a dyslexic, not a word smith.
Tis like asking a blind man, Is that a lovely sun rise?

Even a blind person can feel the rays! It just involves the sense of heat/cold perception, as well as listening to how nature’s sounds change when the sun rises and nocturnal creatures go silent, crepuscular creature do that thing and pipe down, and diurnal creatures take over the chorus of calls, chirps, and foraging sounds. :D

However your words did achieve a very similar pondering affect

Good or bad?
 
With haiku, I don’t think punctuation marks matter — as in, they could be or not be there, just as long as five-seven-five is in there. :)



Even a blind person can feel the rays! It just involves the sense of heat/cold perception, as well as listening to how nature’s sounds change when the sun rises and nocturnal creatures go silent, crepuscular creature do that thing and pipe down, and diurnal creatures take over the chorus of calls, chirps, and foraging sounds. :D



Good or bad?
Oh in the explanation I read, there are punctuation requirements.
It seems recent or westerners writings have overlooked some factors and merely focused on the three line thing. I think they overlooked the simplicity is wot makes it so hard but also it makes it wot it tis.
For me the first question of any design is - wot are the restraints.?
Anything out side of those is a design that doesn't work...no matter how glorious it may be.

Oh - I saw the other senses factor coming re a sun rise. Tis not just a visual.

Your good or bad question caused me to write the following first:

Whoa!!!
..Tis beyond thinking like that.


Let's just say it's better than wot I could do.
But then I've got caught up in the technical side, rather lacking in the very difficult artistic factor.
 
The thing which will eventually drag me into the desktop Linux daily user realm will be when I have no choice but to have to rely on post-Mojave iterations of macOS on T1-embedded Macs. That won’t be for a few more years at least, possibly longer.

And although I’ve, on occasion, run across desktop environments which tried to ape Aqua and/or Marble, they still show through in key ways as being not-either. And for me, that’s the problem. With enough granular configuration, one might be able to completely port over the look and feel of either Aqua or Marble down to the finest detail — from a top menubar with, say, the distro icon living where the Apple icon lives; to pull-downs with shortcuts not spelled out (“Ctrl+T” for new tab? heck no. “⌘T” or go home; “Shift+Ctrl+N”new folder? no. “⇧⌘N” plz & tyvm); to the use of an antialiased Lucida Grande for text elements.

I realize what it is I want: the entire desktop environment being virtually indistinguishable from Finder, down to shortcut keys, even if the DE has to be called “Locator” instead of “Finder” for legal reasons; underneath, the “bones” are linux, not Darwin.

That’s it. That’s all I want. I want to go on working from the front-end without having to be reminded how I abandoned the UX/UI which now registers as deep muscle memory dating back over thirty years (which is, incidentally, another reason I’ve written off all the “SoCal-named” versions of macOS, especially Big Sur and later).
Reading this, mag makes me wonder if there was a Mac OS that ticked all those boxes?
If so, looking back - which one(s) was it?

Someone in here (or somewhere) used the term 'period correct' ie the Mac OS that was designed for that particular Mac hardware. I think that is 'the best of the best'...except for the continuous modernisation of the Internet ie the improvements that make it worse. And the only solution I see is a Linux distribution used solely for going online. It's a nuisance having to swop hats but I think it's the only way to keep up with the Internet.

Otherwise we will be just chasing our tails.
 
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Last Updated on: 8th May 2022, 11:26 am Based on Fedora (?) and KDE. It "looks" like Mac OS X, but like BS Magnet said "they still show through in key ways as being not-either." I've seen and tried a few of these and they fall short. RedStarOS at least has KDE's global menu bar in tact. Just from looking at the screenshot, they could have at least used the " %a %-I:%M %-p " clock format which is usually somewhat easy to update.
 
Last Updated on: 8th May 2022, 11:26 am Based on Fedora (?) and KDE. It "looks" like Mac OS X, but like BS Magnet said "they still show through in key ways as being not-either." I've seen and tried a few of these and they fall short. RedStarOS at least has KDE's global menu bar in tact. Just from looking at the screenshot, they could have at least used the " %a %-I:%M %-p " clock format which is usually somewhat easy to update.
Is that first link correct, mm?
 
I think I got it wrong. I deleted that first link with the domain name ending with .kp I don't really trust much about RedStarOS.
 
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Someone in here (or somewhere) used the term 'period correct' ie the Mac OS that was designed for that particular Mac hardware. I think that is 'the best of the best'...except for the continuous modernisation of the Internet ie the improvements that make it worse. And the only solution I see is a Linux distribution used solely for going online. It's a nuisance having to swop hats but I think it's the only way to keep up with the Internet.
This is one pragmatic way of handling it. On Intel, this can even be "convenient" by using a VM, but it would still imply having an outdated version of the host OS (OS X) online.

Last Updated on: 8th May 2022, 11:26 am http://www.naenara.com.kp/en/kcc Based on Fedora (?) and KDE. It "looks" like Mac OS X, but like BS Magnet said "they still show through in key ways as being not-either."
It was, perhaps not obviously enough, meant as a joke. ;)
 
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Oh in the explanation I read, there are punctuation requirements.
It seems recent or westerners writings have overlooked some factors and merely focused on the three line thing. I think they overlooked the simplicity is wot makes it so hard but also it makes it wot it tis.
For me the first question of any design is - wot are the restraints.?
Anything out side of those is a design that doesn't work...no matter how glorious it may be.

Oh - I saw the other senses factor coming re a sun rise. Tis not just a visual.

Your good or bad question caused me to write the following first:

It was intended to be amusing. :)

I threw that in quotes in the same way as when someone quotes, “Is this loss?” — riffing off a longstanding meme which, once you see, you can never un-see. Alternately, a different, but similar classic meme, “Is this a pigeon?

Whoa!!!
..Tis beyond thinking like that.

Your poem was nice, and I appreciated it. :)

But I’m also quite literal — kind of a sidebar of having a brain on the ASD spectrum: a great skill for writing technical manuals or research essays, less so for back and forth chatting.


Let's just say it's better than wot I could do.
But then I've got caught up in the technical side, rather lacking in the very difficult artistic factor.

Heck, I barely know how to write poetry. That above haiku — or making up a “roses are red” rhyme — is about as good as I can do.
 
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to pull-downs with shortcuts not spelled out (“Ctrl+T” for new tab? heck no. “⌘T” or go home; “Shift+Ctrl+N”new folder? no. “⇧⌘N” plz & tyvm)
I've been a regular Linux user for many years. I have never seen shortcut symbols anywhere outside of the Mac OS (and sometimes Windows' use of their special key). If it exists-- and it probably does-- I've yet to see it.

Particularly in the Unix space, everything has to be spelled out to reduce ambiguity. Not everyone is going to know what "⌘" means, especially if it's not on their keyboard. Apple could use shortcut symbols because (with the exception of Control) these symbols are also on their keyboards. As opposed to spelling out "Shift", "Ctrl", and "Alt" which (with the exception of Apple keyboards that spell out Control in full) are on every keyboard.

It is technically possible and maybe trivial to add such an option; however, I can only reasonably see shortcut symbols being only a thing on Apple hardware. But, since Apple hardware is a small subset of all computers there's not really a major demand to add it. 100% of macOS users are on a Mac (we will not consider Hackintoshes for this), so it makes sense in macOS. Linux users that are on a Mac are much smaller in comparison and even compared to the rest of the machines that can run some Linux distribution (that is to say, all of them ever).

It reminds me of a friend of mine looking for a new mouse, and they had so many dealbreakers that at that point it was too much. Like, there were blacklisted brands, and it couldn't be wireless, and it had to have user-configurable DPI at some level of granularity (I think it was 50). Anyway, at some point there's gotta be a bullet bitten and a compromise made.

I used to laud over the Unity desktop that Ubuntu was shipping because of its extreme simplicity and ease of use-- also it reminded me of Mac OS, though not a full clone of it. I got sad when Canonical killed it off and to this day I still think Unity is the desktop of all time, to the point that my everyday KDE Plasma configuration is modeled heavily after Unity.

Actually that's not entirely true. GNU Nano (and pico before it) used ^ for Ctrl and M for Meta/Alt/Option in their shortcut bar as well.
 
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1920px-Space-cadet.jpg

⇧ Shift
⌃ Ctrl (Control)
⎇ Alt (Alternate) – also labelled ⌥ Option on Apple keyboards.
⇮ AltGr (Alternate Graphic)
◆ Meta – Meta key, found on MIT, Symbolics, and Sun Microsystems keyboards.
✦ Hyper – Hyper key, found on the Space-cadet keyboard
❖ Super – Super key, found on MIT, Symbolics, Linux, and BSD keyboards.
⊞ Win (Windows logo) – found on Windows keyboards.
⌘ Cmd – Command key, found on Apple keyboards. On older keyboards labelled ⌘  (Apple logo).
Fn (Function) – often present on small-layout keyboards, or keyboard where the top row of function keys have multimedia functions like controlling volume attached.
 
I've been a regular Linux user for many years. I have never seen shortcut symbols anywhere outside of the Mac OS (and sometimes Windows' use of their special key). If it exists-- and it probably does-- I've yet to see it.

Particularly in the Unix space, everything has to be spelled out to reduce ambiguity. Not everyone is going to know what "⌘" means, especially if it's not on their keyboard. Apple could use shortcut symbols because (with the exception of Control) these symbols are also on their keyboards. As opposed to spelling out "Shift", "Ctrl", and "Alt" which (with the exception of Apple keyboards that spell out Control in full) are on every keyboard.

Apple’s reliance on symbols over words in English (like Command, Option, Control, Shift, Caps Lock, Mun Lock, etc.) also carried a cost advantage, reducing the amount of re-tooling for labels and (sometimes) different key sizes when selling their product overseas, and also reduced the wait time for language-specific modifier keys to be generated — especially in situations which different related languages used the same keyboard layout (AZERTY, for instance).

For an Aqua/Marble-themes DE to have added in a handy pop-up reference for those symbols, for folks trying out that DE, would be straightforward.

It is technically possible and maybe trivial to add such an option; however, I can only reasonably see shortcut symbols being only a thing on Apple hardware. But, since Apple hardware is a small subset of all computers there's not really a major demand to add it. 100% of macOS users are on a Mac (we will not consider Hackintoshes for this), so it makes sense in macOS. Linux users that are on a Mac are much smaller in comparison and even compared to the rest of the machines that can run some Linux distribution (that is to say, all of them ever).

This is a case argument for why making an Apple-to-Linux transition as seamless as possible supports using those symbols. For me personally, static symbols like @mmphosis ’s post just above) means less long-form reading on a pull-down menu, which ends up being the next-fastest way to find a command (pressing the shortcut keys themselves being the fastest). It also means less visual clutter for the eyes to sort through on those pull-downs.

Turning to the international pictograms movement, arguably a keystone of visual modernism, Apple here got things done well when they adopted this contextual, symbols-based approach with Mac OS back in the 1980s: knowing how the core base of Macintosh users, many in the visual arts, were visually oriented, and that those visual cues, much like the post-1974 universal pictogram symbol approach to visual communication that had taken hold then (co-incident with the uptick in more affordable air travel), could deliver necessary usability info without spelling it out (usually, in English) was demonstrated to work effectively, Apple adopted this as a solutions-based approach, ran with that, and stayed with it. They remained consistent to present day. They are legible symbols to users who speak English, or Japanese, or Italian, or Thai.

So in this UI/UX sense, a more widespread adoption of pull-downs whose modifier keys are language-agnostic would probably attract more users, particularly visual-based learners (as opposed to literal-based — or word-based — users) to the linux-based desktop realm — especially long-time Mac adherents (whose makeup is no longer a paltry 4 or 5 per cent of all desktop/laptop users as it was back during the mid-aughts).
 
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Apple’s reliance on symbols over words in English (like Command, Option, Control, Shift, Caps Lock, Mun Lock, etc.) [...]
Why does my German Magic Keyboard 2 have "Control", "Option" and "Command" in English printed on the respective keys next to their symbols, considering the modifier keys are localised in macOS (except for "ctrl", which on German "PC" keyboards says "Strg" for "Steuerung")?

Bildschirmfoto 2023-04-15 um 20.34.22.png


And, while we're at it, the shortcut for e.g. "Force Quit" is displayed using the ISO symbol for the Escape key... which I've never seen on any keyboard IIRC.
 
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Why does my German Magic Keyboard 2 have "Control", "Option" and "Command" in English printed on the respective keys next to their symbols, considering the modifier keys are localised in macOS (except for "ctrl", which on German "PC" keyboards says "Strg" for "Steuerung")?

View attachment 2189315

I don’t know, @Amethyst1 . I just don’t, because I don’t know where Apple’s current crop of product and UI/UX designers are coming from these days. It’s as if they’re throwing out the book on style and usage consistency and attempting to re-invent the wheel.

But I would like to remember how, as recently as the unibody MBAs, unibody MBPs, and retina MBPs, the Shift, Return/Enter, Tab, Caps Lock, Delete, and Option keys use the universal symbols right on them. On the US/ISO keyboard to default-ship over here, they never, ever have:

71KcC+JBbmL._AC_SL1500_.jpg

Abbildung A. Die Unibody-Tastatur des MacBook Air, in deutscher Sprache.

So idk else what to say. 🤷‍♀️

And, while we're at it, the shortcut for e.g. "Force Quit" is displayed using the ISO symbol for the Escape key... which I've never seen on any keyboard IIRC.

I’ve long wondered why Apple did this, post-Mac OS 9, though to Matias’s credit, their Tactile Pro keyboard (which is an absolute joy on which to type, the handful of times I’ve tried one out at my old university’s bookstore, but my oh my, they’re a spendy penny!), does include it:

matias_tactile_pro_us_large.jpg
 
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I don’t know, @Amethyst1 . I just don’t, because I don’t know where Apple’s current crop of product and UI/UX designers are coming from these days. It’s as if they’re throwing out the book on style and usage consistency and attempting to re-invent the wheel.
Cross-checking the German A1048 I'm typing this on, there's "Ctrl" (no symbol), "Alt" plus symbol and the Command key which has the default and Apple symbols but is devoid of any label.

I’ve long wondered why Apple did this, post-Mac OS 9, though to Matias’s credit, their Tactile Pro keyboard (which is an absolute joy on which to type, the handful of times I’ve tried one out at my old university’s bookstore, but my oh my, they’re a spendy penny!), does include it:
Cool, so displaying the shortcut like this can make sense :p
 
It was intended to be amusing. :)

I threw that in quotes in the same way as when someone quotes, “Is this loss?” — riffing off a longstanding meme which, once you see, you can never un-see. Alternately, a different, but similar classic meme, “Is this a pigeon?



Your poem was nice, and I appreciated it. :)

But I’m also quite literal — kind of a sidebar of having a brain on the ASD spectrum: a great skill for writing technical manuals or research essays, less so for back and forth chatting.




Heck, I barely know how to write poetry. That above haiku — or making up a “roses are red” rhyme — is about as good as I can do.
Heck..it is amusing..
So is a couple of non-poets talking about a 1670s form of poetry
In a discussion on best alternative OSs..and one being haiku
..which isn't available for the Mac.

Tis a wonder we ain't been black listed.
 
Heck..it is amusing..
So is a couple of non-poets talking about a 1670s form of poetry
In a discussion on best alternative OSs..and one being haiku
..which isn't available for the Mac.

Tis a wonder we ain't been black listed.

Unless someone rolls in here spouting ugly nonsense, the overseers generally think of this forum as a shack in the forest which runs on no electricity and a wood-burning oven.
 
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